Default character encoding for each operating system?

John W Kennedy john.w.kennedy at gmail.com
Thu Sep 15 09:36:39 CDT 2016


macOS, and its offspring, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, use UTF-16LE for all internals, but readily import and export all versions of Unicode and a good many historic 8-bit and mixed-length codings. 

In the new Swift programming language, which is white-hot in the Apple community, Apple is moving toward a model of a transparent, generic Unicode that can be “viewed” as UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32 if necessary, but in which a “character” contains however many code points it needs (“e” with a stacked macron, acute accent, and dieresis is algorithmically one “character” in Swift). Moreover, e-with-an-acute-accent and e followed by a combining acute accent, for example, compare as equal. At present, the underlying code is still UTF-16LE.

-- 
SKen Software, LLC
Coming soon to an iPhone near you

> On Sep 15, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> 
> A better question is what is the default character encoding for the **installed** operating system.
> 
> Unfortunately it has no single response, because there are several default encodings for several parts of the OS. An OS has lots of components, many of them don't are transparent to the encoding it uses.
> 
> All the 3 OSes you cite support several default character encodings, and in addition they support them in several encoding forms. All three support Unicode internally, but not in all software components. that will run with one or the other.
> 
> And defaults will change according to your distribution or OS configuration options, and to your own current user settings
> 
> 2016-09-15 13:14 GMT+02:00 Costello, Roger L. <costello at mitre.org>:
>> Hi Folks,
>> 
>> In a book that I am reading [1] the author mentions “the default character encoding for the operating system.” What is the default character encoding of:
>> 
>> -          Windows 10
>> 
>> -          Mac OS
>> 
>> -          Linux
>> 
>> 
>> /Roger
>> 
>> [1] Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, p. 165 (footnote 2).
>> 
> 
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